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When you're a freshman, you don't really have a good notion of what's important and what's not. So, at the beginning of my first semester at UT, I tried to be a good student and gave my best effort to every new concept. At about week two, in the face of stress and activities much more fun than math, my intrinsic motivation broke down.

The Grace Hopper Celebration, a very well-known women in tech conference, happened last week. A couple of my friends went and came back satisfied with their experience and excited by all the things they had done. Personally, I've never considered going to GHC. Back when applications to get sponsored by UT were open, I didn’t even bother to apply because I knew that I would be swamped with homework come October-- and lo and behold, I was right.

Important Announcement: After blogging for more than a year, the UT CS Department has given me an opportunity to speak about the importance of writing as a CS major. It's my pleasure to invite you out to GDC 6.102 this Friday at 12PM to the talk. Lunch will be catered with Cane's. Additionally, a raffle will be held at the end of the session, post Q&A, for a FREE Raspberry PI kit and APPLE WATCH. Finally, the first 5 people who RSVP to the sign-up link at the bottom of the blog post will get an exclusive UTCS Blog T-Shirt. Hope to see you guys out there!

This past week has been quite a busy season for me. After returning from MHacks the weekend before where I lived off of only 4 hours of sleep a day and got to hang out/hack with a few of my friends that I knew in Michigan, I found myself thrown back into the hay of things here at UT. Finishing up Graphics project #1 was a struggle and having to spend most of the days cycling through work, school, and church stuff, I found myself with very little room to breath or time to really rest.

I love computer science. There's nothing like sitting down at my computer for hours on end to work on a complex coding problem. I enjoy the problem-solving, the collaboration, even the search for bugs. But with that being said, computer science isn't my passion. I like it enough to deepen my understanding through taking classes, and I could code every day as my job without getting bored. However, I'm not one of those kids who is intrigued by each problem, who reads language APIs for fun, who comes up with new and innovative projects to work on in their free time.

The last week was very busy for me. With the combined pressure of homework, extracurricular activities, and recruiting season, my well-laid plans quickly fell apart. Since it was the third week of school, my schedule was filled with intro club meetings, auditions for the theater clubs I'm in, and meet-ups with friends I hadn't seen all summer. Unfortunately, this also coincided with career fair week, so on top of schoolwork and social obligations, I also had to go to networking events and prepare for career fair.

These past few days have been quite the recruiting experience. Usually, whenever I think about recruiting, my mind does a double take because of the mixed feelings I have about the whole process - spending days upon days perfecting a resume, reading and writing dozens of emails to various companies, and receiving the sad but real amount of rejections post first-round interview all the way till final interview. Basically, a roller coaster of emotions (definitely a lot of good times though).

Even before my first day at UT, I thought I was set career wise. Set to work at one of those elite Silicon Valley companies that have 4 different brands of kombucha on tap and an indoor petting zoo. I thought I was set, because when I was visiting UT, a sophomore CS major boasted about how Google and Microsoft fought over him his freshman year. I thought I was set, because U.S News puts UT in its top 10 schools for computer science. I thought I was set, because the CNS career fair list was stacked with great companies, all hoping for UT students to come work for them.

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by the authors and those providing comments on these blogs are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or positions of UT Computer Science, The University of Texas or any employee thereof.